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Out of all of the survivors, why is Pryce the only one with ghosts?
There is something both remarkable and remarkably wrong with her brain. She’d love more than anything to just cut in and see, to pay a trusted stranger to take a scalpel to her skull and slice through each tough and pliable layer until the neural matter below was revealed, to attach electrical pathways from place to place to see where the wrench was thrown into the machine. It’s a wretched curiosity which she’s quite rapidly come to define herself by.
It can’t be psychological, surely. Her nervous system underwent a hard reset. There’s no past emotional trauma, no past behavioral or cognitive conditioning — no past anything, in all actuality — to validate the malfunction in a non-physiological way. The only option remaining is a hardware problem. A neurological one. Although, she’s becoming less and less fond of considering it to be purely a problem . There’s certainly one or two minor detrimental details about the way in which her brain functions. There is, however, something different about the way her mind processes data which remains entirely beneficial and quite fascinating, even to her.
She’s more intelligent than every last one of them.
Except the artificial intelligence, perhaps. Though if Hera truly is a product of Pryce’s own creation, then surely she shouldn’t be included in the head count.
She sees patterns in everything, and it’s beautiful, and she hates it. Whatever residue was wiped clean when her mind was reset must not have included equations. Apparently, mathematics were so inherent to her language skills that they were as spared as her English.
You could ask her if she liked coniferous forests, and she would tell you she neither knew nor cared what so many pine trees would look or sound or smell like all grouped together so closely.
You could ask her to explain the fundamentals of backpropagation calculus, and she’d ask for a pen and some paper and an open programming document to guide her words as she dove into a proof or two.
From what Isabel has shared with her, Douglas fared quite differently. He’s shown a tendency towards substance addiction, both before and after the onset of complete retrograde amnesia, but the scientific studies she’s seen are all in relative agreement as to the neurological nature of addiction. This, however, is the only trait which he appears to have retained which cannot be explained by his current environment.
She is a rather different story.
What little she knows about her prior personality traits, she has gathered from the crew’s explanation of her history of… transgressions against humanity.
But her state upon first waking was certainly further from the default than Douglas’ state had been. He had, for the most part, been an entirely average — albeit entirely confused — representative sample of humanity. Pryce had not.
She has a great deal of difficulty understanding and defining subjective things — ‘soft’ things, as Isabel has called them — such as empathy and socialization and emotion. She is a notable bit better than the rest of the general populous at essentially all other cerebral tasks. She is exponentially better than them at mathematics and machine computations.
She has also been experiencing some incredibly mild, statistically insignificant, entirely-not-worth-talking-about, very minor hallucinations.
For example, the man from Hera’s and Lovelace’s stories, whose files and documents Pryce had scrounged a few months ago to learn more about the events that had occurred on the space station — he’s sitting beside her right now.
He’s also dead. He’d been shot out of an airlock, apparently, not long before she awoke. She, as a result of this, never even met the man.
But she’d heard his voice on a few old recordings she’d ripped from a Goddard server and Hera’s databanks, and seen his face on a personnel file, and her malfunctioning brain filled in the blind spots quite nicely.
She twists her head slightly to the side, pulling her fingertips back from the chipped ivory of the piano keys. He doesn’t match her stiff movements, just kicks his feet up onto the corner of the piano bench, leaning back into his chair with crossed arms.
“I’m sorry to say that I don’t understand,” she says, frowning slightly. She doesn’t like not understanding.
“Don’t understand what, exactly?” the man — Warren — says slowly, words catching on his silvery, honeyed voice like gnats on flypaper. It’s remarkable, really. Such a distinct voice. She doesn’t think she’ll ever forget it.
She shakes her head, and her bangs fall frustratingly into her eyes. Her hair is too long, now. And the artificial intelligence seems inexplicably displeased by it. She glances over at the doorway to the kitchen. There are scissors in the third drawer down, farthest to the left. She may grab them later.
“Why you, and why me?.” she asks.
“You know how this works. If you don’t know the answer to a question, then I don’t either.” His hands tap impatiently on the arm of his chair. There’s a series of scars across his knuckles, the way her brain has formed him. She wonders what aspect of his files — or the crew’s stories — lent credibility to such an image, though she wouldn’t doubt for the slightest second that the real Warren Kepler would’ve had a rather similar set of scars.
“Make an educated guess, then,” she suggests coldly, and returns to her playing.
Apparently, her own hallucinations do not respond well to snideness. He hums a different song than the one she’s playing, causing her to err repeatedly in the mess of the cacophony. She halts her playing.
“Is my mind incorrect to assume that you were an incredibly unpleasant man in life?” she asks, venom staining her words as she moves the piano bench back a bit, letting Kepler’s feet fall to the floor.
“In all fairness, Miranda, you were the one who employed me ,” he reminds her, and goes back to his humming.
She sighs. “If I harass you enough about your personal life, will it make you go away? Or is this just my brain’s own version of torturing itself eternally?”
“You never had the chance to meet me. What little you’ve learned about me, you’ve learned from old paperwork and secondhand stories. Even if your strategy to annoy your own hallucinations to death were to work as planned, you don’t know nearly enough about me to do such a thing, do you, Miranda?”
“I know that you were part of a team by the name of SI-5.”
“That’s barely scratching the surface,” he states smoothly, but he raises his brows in a way that Pryce has slowly learned means go on.
“I know the team had three members. Daniel Jacobi, Dr. Alana Maxwell, and you, Warren Kepler. Dr. Maxwell died before you. Daniel Jacobi outlived you both. He speaks of you quite rarely.”
He looks unamused. “Congratulations. You are capable of reciting basic facts. Are you really so incompetent that you can’t even extrapolate any juicy secrets out of all your reconnaissance?”
“I’m not fond of making assumptions on incomplete evidence.”
“If that were true, I wouldn’t even be here,” Kepler vocalizes.
His reasoning is unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. She lets out a held breath and stands, lightly pressing a diminished C-sharp into the keys. Analysis is her strong suit. Surely she can apply that skillset to deducing the history of a hallucinated corpse.
“You betrayed Cutter and the other Pryce. That’s why that woman — Young — killed you. You tried to stop her from doing something. You shot her.”
“That’s just basic context clues. Hell, you were there, even if you had just gotten your mind wiped. Who else could have possibly shot her?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Though the others haven’t yet put two and two together in regards to your switching of sides, it seems. They still think quite ill of you.” She walks over towards the kitchen.
“The others are stupid,” Kepler says placidly as she passes by him.
“The others are stupid,” she agrees. “Or, at the very least, unwilling to face the truth.”
“But they don’t all think so poorly of me, do they?”
“They consider you to be less than human. Which is particularly ironic, given how inhuman most of the group is, myself included.”
“Tell me about Daniel Jacobi,” the man requests, following her into the kitchen.
“What I know, you know.”
“Tell me anyways. Humor me.”
She sighs again, dipping down to grab the scissors from the drawer. They’re dull, but they’ll do.
“Like I’ve already stated, he’s the last remaining member of SI-5. He is a skilled weapons developer and ballistics engineer. He currently lives somewhere in Chicago, not far from Renée Minkowski and Douglas Eiffel.”
“Don’t bore me. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“As we’ve already discussed, that’s physically imp—”
“Do it anyways. Do some educated guessing ,” the man interrupts.
She stares blankly at him, curious as to why her brain has decided to react sarcastically to itself. “He appears to have developed feelings for Douglas,” she hypothesizes.
“And how would I have felt about that?” he says darkly.
“Excuse me?” she asks, standing with the scissors clutched in her left hand and a whetstone in her right.
“If I, Warren Kepler, were alive and on Earth, how would I have reacted to that development?”
“Negatively,” she quips, and turns her attention to sharpening the scissors.
“And why is that?”
“You know as well as I do how poorly I understand the reasoning behind human emotions.”
“You overuse that excuse,” he says, leaning back against the counter. “You’re a smart woman. Conjecture isn’t the devil, Pryce.”
“You would’ve been… upset. Jealous, perhaps.”
“And why? ”
“You were possessive over your team. You wanted Daniel at the top of his game. Douglas would’ve been a distraction. Emotions would’ve been a distraction.”
“Wrong.”
“I liked you better when your were humming,” she snaps, dragging the blade back across the whetstone. She pauses in thought. “Oh. You were in love with him. Interesting.”
Kepler raises his brows. “That’s quite a logical jump, from suggesting I believed emotions to be a waste to stating that I was in love with a man who betrayed me.”
“It is, isn’t it? Though I do believe I am correct.”
“Reasoning?”
She wipes the metallic dust off of the blades with a paper towel and moves the scissors up to her hair, snipping off a large segment into the kitchen sink. “I did my best to listen to whichever of Hera’s old auditory recordings I could access. They were very few and far between, but there were one or two from your time in imprisonment after the coup that would back up my hypothesis quite well."
“But there’s no hard evidence,” he says with a contemptuous smirk, punctuated by Pryce chopping off another chunk of hair. “It’s just sloppy guesswork.”
“It is guesswork, but it’s far from sloppy.”
A slight scratching sounds at the front door, and it opens soon after.
“Hello again, Hera,” she calls over, snipping off the last length of uneven hair. She drags her nails across the exposed nape of her neck, brushing off a few loose strands.
“Were you talking to someone?” Hera asks, padding over. “I though Renée and Isabel were still out.”
“I was talking to myself, dear,” she says, and it’s mostly true. She looks over, and Hera is in the place in which Kepler had been standing. “Do you ever talk to yourself?”
“Always,” Hera says, thoughtfully. “You cut your hair.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“You’re welcome,” she says quietly, and goes to sharpen the knives as well.